I like to share this idea with you: I think that it would be interesting if we use IPv6 not only for pure network purposes but also for identifiying ressources. And with ressources I also mean ideas, people, products, stars, chemical elements, words, languages, revisions, spam mails, viruses (computer and human)…

So this would mean that every product would have a product ID that really is an IPv6 adress and also its class and its revision are IP adresses. So this would enable everybody to uniquely identify a product and its heritage. Right now instead of IPv6 adresses websites use an IPv4 adress plus multiple idenficators.

These adresses could also be used to identfy actions, face expressions, statuses of roads, weather conditions, exit statuses of programs, meals, recipes, cities,…. – And this could also include many different suppliers of these adresses. So Wikipedia may have uniqe adresses for every entry – and the USA have another entry – and then you have two identifiers for one city – but you can combine them – make relations to them. I could also imagine that as the possibilities are just endless that we could again face a limit in the far future of these adresses. I know – all insects may get an identifier – but as this system would include potentially endless elements to get an ipv6 adress and also to give combinations an Ip adress we could produce VIRTUAL instances. So a combination of Berlin and Beer would not only be two IP adresses but this combination would get an IP adress of its own. And also every element in the world could potentially have endless adresses itself.

Why would this be so powerful? Because we would only have one system that would allow multiple suppliers and endless meanings and interpretations -but still you will always know who owns the ip adress. So maybe if you type a random IPv6 adress in on a website it can tell you what it means. The beauty in it is that you will always know what an identifier is unique – and therefore will not ever need to think if it might be used somewhere else (well a t least if you typed it right).

I dont think that this would be the end of human readable identifiers – they are handy – so people will still use them – but at least in computers behind every identifier there will be a truely unique idea. This will enable science to make a HUGE jump because tools get more reliable and errors will decrease drastically. This can also produce new errors and allow misues, because knowledge is power and whoever knows an internal ID might be able to do really bad stuff with it. But still i think we have to do IT!

I am sure somebody else has had this idea before, because it is just too obvious, but I have not yet found it. if you like please add related ideas with your comments.

3 responses to “IPv6 as THE uniqe identifier?”

The good thing is that if you normally have any kind of an ID it tells you nothing. You will always have to know where it belongs. Like you know in these movies where they have a number and dont know what it is for? Think about if you always would know what an ID belongs to! Ok, thsi can be bad also if you want to mask something – but then… try to come with kind of hashes or dont give away the real ID.